When you send HTTP requests to AWS, you sign the requests so that AWS can identify who sent them. You sign requests with your AWS access key, which consists of an access key ID and secret access key. Some requests do not need to be signed, such as anonymous requests to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and some API operations in AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) such as
AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
.

When Do You Need to Sign Requests?

When you write custom code to send HTTP requests to AWS, you need to include code to sign the requests. You might do this for the following reasons:

You are working with a programming language for which there is no AWS SDK.

You want complete control over how a request is sent to AWS.

You don't need to sign a request when you use the
AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)
or one of the
AWS SDKs
. These tools manage the connection details, such as calculating signatures, handling request retries, and error handling. In most cases, they also contain sample code, tutorials, and other resources to help you get started writing applications that interact with AWS.

The signing process helps secure requests in the following ways:

Signing makes sure that the request has been sent by someone with a valid access key. For more information, see .

To prevent tampering with a request while it's in transit, some of the request elements are used to calculate a hash (digest) of the request, and the resulting hash value is included as part of the request. When an AWS service receives the request, it uses the same information to calculate a hash and matches it against the hash value in your request. If the values don't match, AWS denies the request.

In most cases, a request must reach AWS within five minutes of the time stamp in the request. Otherwise, AWS denies the request.

To sign a request, you first calculate a hash (digest) of the request. Then you use the hash value, some other information from the request, and your secret access key to calculate another hash known as the
signature
. Then you add the signature to the request in one of the following ways:

Using the HTTP header.

Your Role

According to the market
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Yankelovich, the average media consumer sees between 3,000 and 20,000 marketing messages per day, depending on how you qualify exposure. Even at the low end of that exposure range, those numbers are far too great for any one label, logo, or slogan to leave a significant impression. And this condition has not been created by the internet and ecommerce either. In fact, studies dating back to the 1960s indicate that people have been exposed to as many as 5,000 advertising messages per day since those early days of television.

The basic business takeaway is that marketingintoday’sconsumer society is excessively message-heavyandover-communicated; people swim in an ocean of advertising messages. So, advertising messages, in and of themselves, must really hit their mark if they want to carry any meaning at all. This is also nothing new; in the late 1960s, the idea of market positioning was born to create a way for brands to cut through all the advertising clutter and reach an audience of people whose minds they stand a chance of leaving an impression on.

So, What is a Market Positioning Strategy?

A positioning strategy is a deliberate branding plan or process that operates on the symbolic levels of consumer consciousness, where meanings and associations – even of individual words – really hold weight. A market positioning strategy is built on business data and seeks to compose the precise chain of words to balance concepts of differentiation, distinction, and similarity in a unified brand-narrative. It is a long-term effort to solidify the identity of a company, and its products or services, in a unique space within the minds of the target audience. It is an organized attempt for a brand to set itself apart from the crowd and influence the way their target audience perceives them.

The idea of market positioning was first introduced in 1969 by Jack Trout in a paper published by Industrial Marketing Magazine. The concept was later popularized when Trout and co-author Al Ries published a bestselling book under the title, Positioning – The Battle for Your Mind, in 1981. Ries and Trout’s book describes the positioning strategy as an organized system for finding a window in the customer’s mind, based on the idea that communication can only take place at the right time and under the right circumstances.

Market Positioning Guide

This brief positioning strategy guide has been compiled to help give you an idea of how market positioning works. It is important to notethat, as a company, business owner, entrepreneur, or corporate executive, you can elect to perform market positioning deliberately, or you can opt out and let things happen organically. But there is a combination of both truth and error in this thinking. Yes, you can opt out of a deliberate positioning strategy if you want, and yes there will be an organic result that flows from inaction. But one way or another, your brand will occupy a market position for as long as it exists, and it’s a mistake not to take full control of it, because you can bet the competition will.

One last cautionary tale before moving on to the guide. Actively positioning a brand means the brand must decide to stand for something, hang their hat on a set of values, and stand by that decision for the long-term. It’s easier said than done, and once positioned, it is very difficult — but not impossible — to reposition without compromising the credibility of the brand. For that reason, a solid market positioning strategy is crucial to the vitality and longevity of a company. The sooner youundertake this process, the better off your business organization will be.

The Steps to an Effective Positioning Strategy

The process is best broken down into its steps to keep the concept as simple as possible. But, do not assume that knowing the steps makes execution easy. It takes a great deal of clarity and conviction to follow through. Knowing the steps should help with the clarity part, but conviction is something that must be developed internally if it doesn’t already exist. It’s very important for marketers to muster the conviction of the organization, because following the process through to the end creates degrees of certainty moving forward that can’t be substituted any other way.

Plenty of companies out there get by without much conviction, and without a dedicated market position strategy. But without some degree of certainty and conviction, most companies will eventually default to the status quo when the waters get choppy. It’s only a matter of time. But, those who can follow the process through to the end will find that every action that follows becomes an expression of the market positioning strategy.

Market positioning follows seven basic steps listed below:

Determining Current Market Position

One of the telltale signs that a brand has neglected their market positioning is that they feel misunderstood by their target audience. If your audience misunderstands you, there’s a good chance that you misunderstand yourself on some level. To sort this predicament out, or avoid it altogether, there are a few questions you need to answer decisively.

The most unique attributes of your business will set you apart from the competition, but establishing difference or uniqueness is not all there is to an effective positioning strategy. ‘Distinction’ of those attributes and values that only your company can provide to customers, also needs to be established. So does ‘attraction’, which can be expressed in terms of attributes and values that the target customer base genuinely wants or needs.

With difference, distinction, and attraction determined, you can then shift the focus outward to determine which customers your company best serves. Those customers will represent the market segment your final market position will beset up to serve.

Great brands understand that it simply isn’t possible to please all people, in all ways, all the time. Instead they rely on a clearly defined market segment where they can serve the customer base more meaningfully because of their unique attributes.

Trying to slot your company into a market position already occupied by a competitor entails a tough uphill battle. It’s also a bad idea to try and leverage another brand by likening yours to it. Imitationmay be the highest form of flattery, but in business, flattering the competition too much can weaken your brand just as easily as it can strengthen it.

Address these questions for yourself and write the answers down so they can be referenced or revisited later.

Competitor Analysis

Next, you want to conduct a thorough competitor analysis to understand who they are, what strategies they use or may have planned, how they may react to your strategic actions, and how your actions may influence their behavior to your advantage. Some of the data you’ll need is easy to find. Some will take time and effort to gather and analyze. As long as you understand that this process will aid the development of your own marketing strategies – and help locate needs in the market that aren’t being met–then maintaining the motivation to see the process through shouldn’t be a problem.

A thorough competitor analysis can be broken down into four subcategories.

Competitor Positioning Analysis

Michael Porter of Harvard Business School says that thereare five forces of competitive position analysis that determine the competitive intensity and attractiveness of a market, and point to the place where power lies in any business situation. Porter’s five forces are:

The competitor positioning analysis will help you understand the factors that influence profitability in the market where you wish to compete. The resulting data set will also help inform decisions concerning whether to enter a specific industry or not, whether to increase capacity in a specific industry, and how to go about developing competitive strategies.

Competitor Compare and Contrast

Now gather together your company’s version of the same set of information that you sought out in the competitor analysis and the competitor positioning analysis. Hold the two data sets up for comparison. It should become pretty evident where your market positioning strategy should place its focus. Market positions that allow you to take full ownership of a niche are rare but valuable.

Develop a Unique Positioning Idea

Once the ideal market position is identified the goal is to create a unique impression in the mind of customers that associates something specific and desirable aboutyour brand that is distinct from the other competitors in the space. With all this information in hand, you should be able to clearly and specifically state who you are as a company, who you are not, what problems exist in the market, how you solve for those problems, and how to cater to the customer base that will benefit from the solutions you offer. Will you need to
translate website
copy into other languages to serve the most promising market segments, for example?

These facts form the basis of the market positioning statement. It’s now time to draft a formal statement about those facts.

Drafting a Positioning Statement

The formula for the market positioning statement will probably look very familiar. It might even seem simplistic. But, all the investigation and data analysis you’ve done up to this point should indicate that a positioning statement is far more than just a chain of hollow platitudes. Every word of the positioning statement is deliberate and backed by the data you have gathered. It is from that process that the authority and credibility of your brand should be built.

The positioning statement, which becomes the basis for subsequent advertising and communication initiatives, first identifies who the company is and what it stands for. From that point it identifies the target customer, what their needs are, and then states how those specific needs will be addressed by the brand. Then the positioning statement transitions to a statement of distinction that sets the brand apart from the competition.

Here are a couple of examples of positioning statements:

Amazon used this positioning statement back when it almost exclusively sold books:

“

The four steps to creating a positioning statement are:

Once you have completedthese four steps, you are ready to draft a positioning statement. Begin with the following formula, and edit down to the most simple concise statement that maintains the full measure of substance. In each of the (parenthetical) categories try to be as granular, and specific as possible.

Testing the Effectiveness of the Final Brand Positioning Concept

Positioning concept tests are the final step in the process. You’ll have to build your own testing model according to your industry and target audience. Generally speaking, testing methodology should include a combination of qualitative and quantitative data gathering which may include focus groups, surveys, in-depth interviews, ethnography, polls, etc. The core questions revolve around the planned purchase of the brand or product (given its implicit positioning), the image projected by the brand, the planned frequency of usage, pricing expectations, distribution expectations, potential problems, and so forth.

Based on the findings of these tests, a winning positioning concept can be solidified. This winning positioning concept then becomes the blueprint for the development of all creative advertising assets and marketing plans and materials (packaging, promotion, pricing, brand name, distribution, product improvements, website copy, customer service, and so on). All subsequent brand messages must remain consistent with the final brand positioning concept.

Every brand has a positioning, even though it may be obscure or unrecognized. Sometimes this positioning is a result of inertia, history, or competitive activities that seem natural to the day-in-day-out operation of the company. But, a brand that wants to be strategically successful must not leave its positioning to chance, or worse, for competitors to decide. The company or brand that aspires to market dominance must take control of its positioning through the scientific methods of marketing research. And creatingyour optimal positioning strategy will guide the focus, and energize long-term advertising and marketing efforts of your brand.

Before making final decisions on final drafts here are some criteria your new market positioning statement should meet:

Using data from the competitor analysis, competitor position analysis, and the compare and contrast section of this guide, you should be able to evaluate each draft of the market positioning statement and rate them against these criteria.

Repositioning

The typical mindset underpinning arguments against a formal market positioning strategy is that it induces an official organizational stance regarding company identity, core values, desired clientele, and so on. Once a hard stance has been assumed, the idea of pivoting to match the needs of a shifting market might seem more risky. It’s true that repositioning involves risk, mainly to brand credibility. It’s also true that market positioning places limits on
market penetration
, but that fact should be treated as less a restriction than a liberation from thinking about segments where yield is likely to be low. In volatile markets it can be necessary, even urgent, to make moves toward repositioning product lines, brands, or even entire companies. It’s also true that market repositioning presents serious challenges– thatare more difficult toface without robustly detailed data sets from a thorough initial market position analysis– but if managed and timed correctly, repositioning can offer greater value .

None of the above are legitimate reasons to avoid formal market positioning. For one thing, once an organization has experienced the full process of market positioning, subsequent attempts at the same process should become easier and more efficient. And the idea that neglecting market positioning allows businesses the ability to pivot more easily is often negated bythe awkward position of trying to be all things to all people, wasting precious business resources on fruitless endeavors. Brands without an adequate positioning strategy stand to find any market volatile. The good news is that neither positioning, nor repositioning require the creation of something new and different per se. They simply require making the connections that already exist in the minds of yourcustomer base, and of course, the conviction of your brand.